So far what I've been developing has worked in Chrome and, using fallbacks, IE8. What I don't get is this: Safari just won't start loading <video> or <audio> content. Safari 6 won't load, and neither will iOS 5's Safari: My code calls .load() on the elements at the appropriate time (at least for Chrome), so what gives? Here is the video declaration: <video width="800" height="600" class="faces" id="facesVideo"> <source src="video/grid.mp4" type="video/mp4" /> <source src="video/grid.ogv" type="video/ogg" /> </video> The audio is declared dynamically, but has the same problem. Do I need to wait for some DOM event that Chrome doesn't need before calling .load()? What does it take to get Safari to start buffering until the elements can fire canplaythrough?